GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MAILER ALL TOO HUMAN A TALE STATEWIDE Edition

• Published in: The Hartford courant
• Main Author: OWEN McNALLY Owen McNally is a features writer for The Courant
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hartford, Conn Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 18.05.1997
• ISSN: 1047-4153

Mailer, a Titan of American literature, hath proclaimed himself eminently qualified to write this new New Testament. After all, he has wrestled with issues of good and evil in epic accounts of such iconic figures as Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald and Gary Gilmore and of such once venerated institutions as the Pentagon and the CIA. In "Ancient Evenings," a novel of Old Testament girth, he unraveled the theology of ancient Egypt, dealing with such once mighty divinities as Osiris, Isis and Ra. And in one of his more wonderfully flaky moments -- another nutty epiphany savored by devout Mailerites -- the great man has declared his semi-divine right to write about Christ, who was both man and God, because he, Norman Mailer, has also lived a life of duality as both man and celebrity. Celebrityhood in Mailer's catechism is right up there with godhood. If you think of Mailer as a boisterous macho figure -- as, in fact, the one true apostolic successor to Papa Hemingway -- you might think his great gifts would be better spent re-creating the lives of horny, hedonistic Greek divinities, or heavyweight champion thunder bolt tossing deities like Zeus or Thor. Or you might think a Maileresque gospel might present Jesus as a pot smoking, brawling, womanizing, bearded, wife-stabbing hipster, a prophetic writer immersed in the holy teachings of psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, a shrink obsessed with orgasms, or with philosopher Jean Paul Sartre's credo of angst, being and nothingness.